Thursday, December 25, 2014

An estimated 62% of our country will attend Christmas
services this month, and right at the center of the message they’ll hear are
angels singing about Jesus, the fulfillment of ancient prophecies, and a baby
born to a young virgin. For many who want to believe—or at least be inspired by
the Christmas story—it’s hard to accept these decidedly strange teachings in an
increasingly technological and scientific world. That’s especially the case if
you’re part of the 30% of 18-30 year olds in our country that list “None” when
presented with the question, “What religion are you?”

Having
just finished teaching a college course on science and religion, certain related
questions fascinate me. Can my students still believe today? And, if they do,
what accommodations will be made for their faith and vice versa?

There
are some challenging statistics. According the noted researchers Christian Smith
and Kyle Longest, 70% of 18-23 year olds “agree” or “strongly agree” that the
teachings of religion and science conflict. In addition, a complementary study
by David Kinnaman found that one of the six top reasons that the infamous 30%
of young adults have left the church is that the latter is seen as
“antiscience.”

Congregations
are going to have to engage science and its insights. There is a science to
Christmas’s future.

I’m
currently working on a research project where I analyze these and other surveys
and interview young adults (18-30 years old) on how they formed their ideas
about religion and science and how these attitudes change. So, over cappuccinos
and chai at Starbucks, or across the desk in my office, or lounging at the
student center, I talked with students one-on-one.

Partly
this research arises from a personal interest in figuring out where this
interaction is headed. If religion and science are going to be with us for a
while (and there’s no indication that either is going away), then minimally
we’ve got to find a way for them to coexist. And who is going to lead this
discussion? Put another way, who’s going to attend Christmas services (or not)
in 20 years? It’s emerging adults. Or not.

On
how to relate religion and science people usually fall something into three
categories: warfare (religion and science will never agree), independence (they
are two different ways to look at the world that ought to go separate ways),
and integration (they need to make a difference to each other.)

The
result of my study of young adults? Along with Longest and Smith, some students
are hardcore adherents to what’s known in my business as the “warfare thesis.”
As one student, Elaine, commented, “I think that science and religion will always be in conflict because
science and religion will never be able to agree, and there are such
contradicting views.” But most emerging adults I’ve interviewed,
however, aren’t themselves convinced religion and science are incompatible.
Instead, they’ve heard about the
conflict between the two (maybe they caught Bill Nye and Ken Ham on TV or
Richard Dawkins on YouTube), but individually, they are quite interested in coming
to a détente and not fighting a war of attrition.

The
second view, independence, is a quite reasonable response to a pluralistic and
contentious world in which emerging adults are fatigued by rancor. My study indicates
that students take this approach when they’re not really sure what they
believe. And that’s a fairly large category.

Finally,
young adults endorse and integration of science and religion. Some recommend
exploration or a creative choosing of components from each. The Buddhist-Christian-Wiccan.
The hardcore biochemistry student who can’t deny that he prayed and the request
was granted, but he’s not sure if it’s not simply coincidence. And continues to
pray. That sort of thing.

But
many want to integrate science with reasonably standard beliefs, and some
follow thought leaders like the 20th century Oxford intellectual C.S. Lewis, who knew that belief in God allowed for—even necessitated—an ability
to work around laws that God himself created. In this sense, miracles like
virginal conceptions and fulfilled prophecies do not, in fact, break the laws
of nature. The more certain we know these law, Lewis argued, “the more clearly
we know that if new factors have been introduced the results will vary
accordingly.” What we don’t know if a supernatural power might not be this new
factor. Nonetheless, Lewis also warned a group of Anglican priests, that
Christianity must be careful about using science glibly, “Science twisted in the interests of apologetics
would be a sin and a folly.” In any event, an increasing number of young adults
remain such a God, or any supernatural power, exists. And that brings me to a
prediction.

If
I were to predict a future based on these studies and others, I would say that
the boundary between science and religion is by no means fixed and that this
conversation will go on for some time. It seems then, for the short term, most Americans
will go to Christmas services. The future of Christmas may depend on if they
will be able to take their science with them.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

While speaking several times about C. S. Lewis recently,
I’ve been asked the question of why he’s so popular. One answer seems to keep
coming to mind: that Lewis doesn’t ultimately give us answers—he invites our response. And he often does that
through an act of imagination.

How?
His genius imagination invites us as readers to engage our questions, grasp
Lewis’s resolutions and ponder our own answers.

Lewis
certainly learned the power of imagination as a seventeen year old. In February
1916—fifteen years before he became a Christian—Lewis first read George
MacDonald’s, Phantastes, which
“baptized his imagination” and impressed him with a deep sense of the “holy.” Ten
years later, in 1926 Lewis read G. K. Chesterton, who led the still-atheistic
Lewis to grasp “the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that
seemed to me to make sense.” Indeed, that is what Lewis wanted to do with his
readers years later in his The Space
Trilogy from the 1930s and The
Chronicles of Narnia from the 1950s—to give his readers’ imagination the
view of another world, even past the prejudices, the “stained glass and Sunday
school associations” that bar readers from engaging Christ’s reality. Through the
acts of imagination, “Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?”
Lewis asks. “I thought one could.”

And
Lewis’s imagination was so amazingly fertile and nimble. I’ve been reading The Magician’s Nephew from Narnia, and what strikes the reader—at
least this reader—is how easily the ideas and narratives flowed for Lewis. Famously,
this ease of writing frustrated his good friend (at the time) J. R. R. Tolkien,
who fretted over every sentence and who left the narrative of Lord of the Rings for over a year dangling
with Gandalf having plunged down the Mines of Moria, but not knowing what would
come next.

The
argument in my book C. S. Lewis and theCrisis of a Christian is that Lewis’s life was really hard (for example,
his mother’s death, two world wars, caring for an alcoholic brother, the death
of his wife). But for him imagination was easy. He even spoke of the main character
“Aslan bounding into” some fragmentary story ideas. And he let his imagination
run with the Great Lion and see where it led. “I don’t know where the Lion came
from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together,
and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories after Hi.”

And
it’s not simply Aslan. Who of Lewis’s readers could forget Puddleglum or Lucy
or Jadis or Ransom or the talking Beavers? We, I believe, are the better for
that Lion and all those characters running through Lewis’s imagination and thus
through ours.